'Internet' Category
Suveillance Cameras, IRC, Privacy and Data Use
Catching up on Bloglines, I came across this post by Alec Saunders about proposed surveillance cameras in Ottawa. It evoked a strange kind of cultural dissonance: virtually every town in Britain is already a panopticon. And most people don’t think twice about the roving, all seeing eyes (there are two within sight of Calico Jack’s […]
Pubs, BBC Radio 4 iPM and the Future of Facebook
I’ve always thought that social networking sites will turn out to be like pubs: rising in popularity, going out of fashion and then being reinvented. On this basis, planning future development on the basis of Facebook’s inevitable rise does not seem prudent - strategically, this is an important issue - even before the Beacon fiasco […]
Mobile Social Networking at Hillington
The Wireless Innovation Centre at Hillington, a key hub drawing together the disparate wireless scene in Scotland, hosted a mobile social networking event the Friday before last. The centre’s technology manager Alisdair Gunn kicked the day off by installing Andy Campbell (”Chief Networker” and CEO of Specialmove) as compere. Andy, well known in the […]
Looming darkness: a telco opportunity
The glow of artificial light at 5.30 on a dark, wet winter morning might not seem like a cause for cheer. But, with 75 MPH winds over Fife last night, I was expecting the usual storm routine: find the old phone, plug it in - or if the phone lines were down go outside the […]
Web 2.0, long tail, Web 3.0: anyone for the long term?
In the Autumn of 1989 I came back from my industrial training year at Eurostat in Luxemburg with a view that speech technology was going to be the next big thing. After completing my degree, I set out for Edinburgh the following year to join a new MSc in Speech and Language Processing - […]
Web 2.0, the Economies of Culture and Machiavellian Chimps
I first came across Machiavellian Intelligence and Chimpanzees over morning coffee in the staff common room of the St Andrews University School of Psychology. I should quickly clarify that there were no chimps present, the academic politics at St Andrews was no more vicious than at any other University and no animals have […]
Social networking: not an open and closed case
I was born in Great Yarmouth, a town on the East Coast of Norfolk. The town is essentially built on a long sandbank formed at the confluence or rivers flowing from the Broads. The tidal Breydon Water lies behind the town. Small boats navigate its narrow channels to move between the Broadland Rivers. […]
von Clausewitz, openness, Web 2.0 and War 2.0
Leaving aside the frequent appropriation of language, it’s not hard to establish a practical and theoretical link between business, war and politics: Karl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military strategist who aimed to teach clear strategic thinking, is often quoted as describing war as an extension of diplomacy. He also said that war […]
Mobile Web 2.0: Californian greenhouse gas or a new force in emerging telephony?
Is mobile Web 2.0 a cloud of Californian greenhouse gas or a new force in emerging telephony? Andrew Orlowski’s recent Register article points to the former view, while another Register article about Nokia and T-Mobile’s USA pinning their hopes on mobile Web 2.0 paints a brighter picture. Some other mobile Web 2.0 links can […]
Cocomment: A step towards joined up blogging
While the Web has brought great bounty to Internet, the downside is that its client-server model has tended to eclipse the collaborative and participatory ethos of services like Usenet. The early Internet ideals were in danger of being subsumed by a Web in which users were relegated to docile, passive, paying consumers of “content” served […]